Muhammad Ahsan Dar

Muhammad Ahsan Dar (1960-) was the founder of the Hizbul Mujahideen separatist group in the Kashmir region of northern India, creating the group in 1989 to fight for self-determination for the Muslim Kashmiri population.

Biography
Muhammad Ahsan Dar was born in 1960 in Sariwarpora Pattan, Baramulla, Jammu and Kashmir, India to a Sunni Muslim Kashmiri family. Dar was a proponent of Kashmiri self-determination, and he crossed the border into Pakistan in 1985, where he was trained by the Inter-Services Intelligence. In 1990, he returned to the Kashmir Valley after receiving Pakistani training, and he formed Hizbul Mujahideen to fight for Kashmiri self-determination. He was a puppet of Pakistan, which sought to unite the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir with Pakistan. In the 1990s, he had 12,000 fighters under his command, but in 1993 he was arrested after being betrayed by one of his own men. He would be released in 1999, and he continued to wage guerrilla warfare against India; in 2008, he was arrested again, only to be released in 2012 due to intense health issues, including diabetes and kidney dysfunction.